100+ Facts about Meditation to aid your introspection

• Take 5 to 10 minutes for a simple seated meditation.
• Take 100 deep breaths, counting “and one,” “and two,” and so on, with “and” on the inhalations and the numbers on the exhalations.
• Take a meditative walk, focusing solely on the physical sensations of walking.
• Find a guided meditation on YouTube and let it lull you into a blissful state of presence.

“Meditation is not about clearing the mind; it’s about focusing on one thing. When the mind wanders, the meditation isn’t a failure. Our brain is like a wayward puppy, out of control. Catching it and putting it back to the object of focus is the mediation.”

by Brooks, director of the Austin Psychology and Assessment Center

• Walking meditation. “We weren’t meant to sit in cubicles all day and when we disconnect from nature, we suffer a lot of stress.”
• Red light meditation. While stopped at a red light, turn off your radio and focus on deep breaths.
• Running/cycling meditation. If you run or bike, leave your headphones at home and focus on the experience.
• Eating/drinking meditation. As you eat or drink, focus on the various flavors, textures, and sensations of the particular food or drink.
• Waiting meditation. While in line, observe your breath or surroundings.
• Task-related meditation. For example, washing your hands, folding laundry, taking a shower, washing dishes, or brushing your teeth can serve as mini-meditations if you focus on the experience and stop your mind from wandering.

Start just by sitting on a chair, or on your couch. Or on your bed. If you’re comfortable on the ground, sit cross-legged. It’s just for two minutes at first anyway, so just sit. Later you can worry about optimizing it.

You can do meditation in your office, in the park, during your commute.

Sitting meditation is the best place to start, but in truth, you’re practicing for this kind of mindfulness in your entire life.

Studies on the relaxation response have documented the following short-term benefits to the nervous system:

• Lower blood pressure
• Improved blood circulation
• Lower heart rate
• Less perspiration
• Slower respiratory rate
• Less anxiety
• Lower blood cortisol levels
• More feelings of well-being
• Less stress
• Deeper relaxation

1. Sit or lie comfortably.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Make no effort to control the breath; simply breathe naturally.
4. Focus your attention on the breath and on how the body moves with each inhalation and exhalation. Notice the movement of your body as you breathe. If your mind wanders, return your focus back to your breath.

Maintain this meditation practice for two to three minutes to start, and then try it for longer periods. 

People meditate, not out of obligation or a hope that it will be helpful. They meditate because it creates very visible, very real positive changes in their lives.

• Reduces Pain without releasing pain-reducing chemicals, called opioids.
• Reduces Blood Pressure
• Ease Symptoms Of Anxiety And Depression
• Help You Quit Smoking (And Other Bad Habits) Meditation will give you nearly a 90% chance of stopping smoking and never relapsing.
• Become More Spiritual And Improve Your Life 

• Choose Your One Habit & commit to it.
• Attach meditation to your morning routine.
• Tell Someone. It is extremely powerful for building a habit.
• Reward Yourself to keep you motivated.
• Make Meditation Part Of Who You Are.
• Meditate Every Day.

...include stress reduction, sharpened concentration, and improved circulation to start.

Once you begin to practice, you'll soon experience a quieter mind, a more open heart, and a sense of inner freedom.

The practice of Zen meditation (Zazen), is the core of Zen Buddhism and it’s a way of vigilance and self-discovery which is practiced while sitting on a meditation cushion. It is the experience of living from moment to moment, in the here and now and also how Gautama got enlightened and became the Buddha.

Zazen is an attitude of spiritual awakening.

It is a practice to control the power of thought and to cultivate more peace, clarity and happiness.

Meditation enables us to move from higher frequency brain waves to lower frequency waves, which activates different centers in the brain.

It  works through a combination of several distinct mechanisms:

• Attention regulation. Focused attention for an extended period of time.
• Body awareness. Paying attention to surroundings, thoughts and bodily sensations.
• Emotion regulation. Learning to observe your thoughts and accept them without reactive judgment while refraining from the habitual response.
• Change in perspective on the self. 

It involves yoga poses in order to extend your energy from the base of your spine all the way to your mind.

The purpose of the practice is to focus on both your breath and posture together in order to gain full bodily control, allowing the energy flow to increase all throughout your body.

The purpose is to become aware of your thoughts by simply observing them. It allows thinking about why you're thinking your thoughts.

The practice revolves around learning how to rid yourself of any self-doubt. After you cultivate personal love, you will be able to wish love to all those around you.

The goal is to be able to keep your concentration focused on one thing and not to allow your mind to wander.

• In guided meditation, a teacher guides you through the basic steps of the practice. This is useful for beginners to get the most out of the experience.
• In unguided meditation, you meditate without someone else explaining the process.

The intention of calming meditation is to cultivate a quieter, more peaceful state of mind and improved concentration.

Insight meditation often sets an intention to transform the mind by developing qualities such as wisdom and compassion. 

Many meditation techniques combine elements of both.

This form uses bowls, gongs, and other instruments.  Creating sound vibrations helps to focus the mind.

Loving-kindness and compassion meditation involves cultivating a love for people who are suffering. Loving-kindness meditation can change your neural circuitry even faster than mindfulness meditation.

Typically, in loving-kindness meditation, you repeat certain phrases in your head, such as "may I be safe," "may I be healthy". After you wish these things for yourself, you wish the same things for people you love, and then you circle out.

Meditation is not for everyone. For some people, meditation can provoke intense mental distress of impaired physical functioning.

More and more people are turning today to Buddhism, in order to find back the quietness that everyday life makes them lose. 

Moreover, individuals claim that Buddhism enables them to deal with their suffering and find joy within.

One of Buddhism's most popular teaching is the so-called 'impermanence. The term refers to the idea that everything has an end, no matter how difficult might seem to deal with at a certain point in time.

Feedback, if done well, can leave people feeling motivated and positive:

• The power of expectations. Establish from the outset what the feedback is intended to accomplish as the person receiving the feedback owns their emotional reaction.
• The power of accuracy and specificity. Provide feedback on performance, not the person's character.
• Feedback is focused on the future. Discuss ways how to get there.
• Believing in the project. Your feedback highlights your personal investment
• The power of relationship. Use what you know about the person to give better feedback & keep them accountable.

Motivation is not enough. To encourage lasting change, we need reminders, repetition, and habits.

• Reminders: Schedule your gym times in your planner with your client meetings. Set out your running clothes the night before.
• Repetition: Regular reminders can create repetition, which is essential for lasting change. Track your progress on a visible chart.
• Habits: We form habits when we keep up our reminders and repetition, as the brain creates new pathways associated with a particular behaviour.

Some techniques to enhance motivation:

• Acknowledge what the person says to show that you're really listening.
• Clarifying can deepen mutual understanding.
• Validating a person's feelings is essential so they don't feel judged.
• Ask how he or she managed to overcome a similar situation.
• Help the person to reframe the situation.
• Celebrate their wins to increase positive emotions.
• Expose limiting beliefs by asking how true is that belief and how has it affected them.
• Consider the opposite view they currently hold 
• Assumptions are about why, if this happened in the past, must it happen again.

Settle in

• Find a quiet space. Using a cushion or chair, sit up straight but not stiff; allow your head and shoulders to rest comfortably; place your hands on the tops of your legs with upper arms at your side.

Now breathe

• Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and relax. Feel the fall and rise of your chest and the expansion and contraction of your belly. With each breath notice the coolness as it enters and the warmth as it exits. Don't control the breath but follow its natural flow.

Stay focused

• Thoughts will try to pull your attention away from the breath. Notice them, but don't pass judgment. Gently return your focus to your breath. Some people count their breaths as a way to stay focused.

Take 10

• A daily practice will provide the most benefits. It can be 10 minutes per day, however, 20 minutes twice a day is often recommended for maximum benefit.

1. Mindfulness Meditation: Mindfulness means being present at the moment. Just flow with your environment. When any thought comes just watch it and let it go.
2. Focus Meditation: You need to focus on something just like your breath or flickering flame or a sound of a bell, or any sensation in your body.
3. Mindfulness Breathing: This is just a combination of mindfulness meditation and focus mediation and this is also called open awareness meditation.
4. Transcendental Meditation: Here a 'mantra' is chanted while doing this and the mantra is given by his/ her guru or master.
5. Moving Meditation: Mindfulness meditation but while you are working.

1. Creative Visualization: Here ina relax state of mind you visualize 3 mental screens - your problem, the success, and the process.
2. Intuitive Meditation: Here you just free your mind to think about a specific problem for long enough.
3. Forgiveness Practice: In this, you try to forgive someone or maybe yourself from some bad past experiences.
4. Connection Meditation: Here you feel love and compassion not only for you and your close one for everyone you have come contact to.
5. Directive Healing: You go into delta state of mind where the natural healing process takes place and you direct your mind consciously to heal itself from its own.
6. Reprogramming: Here you reprogram your own belief system.

Most productivity or business books, podcasts, conferences or TED talks have the same solution to being more successful and happier: meditate for twenty minutes once or twice a day.

But meditation as a practice doesn't always work with where we currently are in our lives. We may be too excited and optimistic to sit still or even too young. There are also other ways to ensure we are not always in a reactionary mode.

• Consciously decide to have "No Podcast" moments while commuting, cooking, cleaning or exercising. Letting your mind wander while focusing on a repetitive task isn't a bad thing.
• Go to the movies alone, where you focus on a film and nothing else.
• Going to the sauna is the closest feeling to a long meditation session.
• Take a weekend break alone. Focusing on the scenery, observing the people and being aware of where you are is very calming for the mind.
• Play a videogame. It can help you into an intensely focussed, meditative state.
• Draw or paint.
• Write.
• Play music.
• Exercise.

Talking meditation involves speaking slowly and taking time to process the other person's message.

Many people speak quickly, without thinking deeply about their responses in conversation. Making communication a more sacred act can strengthen relationships and increase intimacy.

1️⃣ Focused attention

• It stresses concentrating on a single object, such as breathing, and ignoring other stimuli. 
• It is strongly related to convergent thinking, which is important for narrowing options and formulating a workable solution.

2️⃣ Open-monitoring

• It involves observing and noting phenomena in the present moment and keeping attention flexible and unrestricted.
• It's far more effective in stimulating divergent thinking, a key driver of creativity

A state of conscious awareness resulting from living in the moment is not sufficient for creativity to come about.

To be creative, you need to have, or be trained in, the ability to observe, notice, and attend to phenomena that pass your mind’s eye.

Tibetan monks meditate for hours upon hours each week. Their devotion to their religious traditions makes them experts in the practice of meditation.

Turns out those experts have a lot to teach us about how sustained mindfulness affects the brain.

It is more customizable than mantra meditation, using a mantra or series of words that are specific to each practitioner.

This practice is for those who like structure and are serious about maintaining a meditation practice.

There’s no such thing as perfect meditation. Sometimes your focus will wander or you’ll forget to follow your breath. That’s OK. It’s part of the experience. What’s most important is to meditate consistently. It’s one of those things where the journey is more important than the destination.

• The trick to life is to not let the mind be your master but let it be your servant.
• Meditation allows you to quiet your monkey mind.
• After meditating, Hugh Jackman feels that his attention is clearer and he can listen better
• Hugh meditates twice a day almost every day.

Meditating can change the structure and function of the brain through relaxation, which can reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. Increase focus and learning concentration. Improve memory and attention span.

Disconnects us with the world and blazes out our focus for the given task. Use OM Chanting, Reverse Number Counting and Warm Nasal Breathing for maintaining a long-lasting habit.

Key to Hear : Timings should be maintained, if delayed the sleep cycle may trip a lot. As when you reach your focused mind state shouldn't be the time you are heading to your bed.

Meditation is mainly focused on shifting your circle of attention to:

• your inside world, where you focus on your breath, your heartbeat etc (interoception)
• the outside, as your attention sets on sounds, smells etc. (exteroception)

These 2 types are the extremes on a spectrum of perception. Some of us are more attuned to our own states (like if we are aware of our heartbeats during normal activity), some are more exteroceptive, meaning we pay attention to our surroundings.

Dr. Huberman recommends practicing a type of meditation that goes against your normal mode of perception. 

• See where you are on the perception spectrum. If you are an inward focused person focus on the outside. Do the opposite if you are focused in the outside. 
• Recognise if you want to relax or you need to increase your focus.
• Sit in meditation for at least 3 minutes/day to get any benefits. 

Three ideas to motivate people to change their behavior  with less fear-inducing message:

1. Social Incentives
2. Immediate Rewards
3. Progress Monitoring

Meditating in silence gives you a great amount of time to calm you down, get you relaxed and when your soul is peaceful, it finds the best solutions

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The Bayesian brain hypothesises that our mind works like an AI predictive model. We don't experience our world directly, but we perceive it. Meaning we construct it using both our senses and our prior beliefs.

If this is true then meditation can act as a way to improve our experience of ourself and of the world. By making us aware of our biases and allowing us to change how we create the world. This is the proposition of Shamil Chandaria, one of the AI pioneers, having worked at DeepMind (now part of Google).

Meditation allows us:

• to over-emphasise our senses (as opposed to our priors) through attentional meditations (where we count our breaths for example)
• to become aware of our priors (higher level models in the Bayesian brain like our ethical foundations) and the ways we build reality through deconstruction type meditations like mindfulness
• to reconstruct ourselves through constructive meditations like love&kindness.

If we place the 3 types of meditation of on a 3D chart we can plot the evolution of meditator from "monkey mind" to enlightenment. Just like the Jhanas, states of deep mental concentration and absorption that are cultivated in Buddhist meditation.

In short meditation:

• lowers the weight of the priors compared to our senses
• attenuates our high-level priors: beliefs, attitudes etc
• allows us to tweak our change our priors or create new ones